Abstract
Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen was a middle-aged man of 48, seemingly insignificant, diffident and mild, an introvert, a chemist and pharmaceuticals and patent medicines' agent. His wife for some 18 years, Cora Crippen, was very different in character – a lively extrovert, a woman of inordinate vanity, a music hall artiste, calling herself Belle Elmore. They were both American in origin. They did not get on well together. Crippen had a young assistant, Ethel Le Neve, 20 years younger than him; a relationship developed and she became his mistress. The wife must have known of the three-year affair. Sexual relations had not taken place between husband and wife for four years. The wife had no work but she had money and was probably a high-class prostitute. All love and affection between them had long since gone.
One day, 31 January 1910, the wife ‘disappeared’. She left no note, no forwarding address and apparently did not take those personal things with her that one might expect in the case of a withdrawing wife. Crippen gave a number of ‘explanations’ for her disappearance, though they were not entirely consistent, and indeed were untrue. She had gone to live in America he said, he did not know where; later she had died, he said. In the witness box he lied and was exposed as a liar. Soon after the disappearance of the wife, a few days indeed, the mistress moved in; they started to appear together in public, and she wore the wife's jewellery. This aroused the suspicion of friends of the wife. The police were called and they started investigations, and interviewed him on 8 July 1910. Then suddenly, on 10 July 1910, Crippen and his mistress fled. They boarded a liner, SS Montrose, bound for North America. The mistress was dressed as a boy. This aroused the suspicion of the captain, who communicated with England by wireless telegraphy (this was in the early days of Marconi wireless); the police boarded a faster boat, arrived in North America before the suspects, arrested them on arrival, gained unopposed extradition and brought them back to England. Crippen was duly charged with murder and brought before the judge, Lord Alverstone LCJ at the Central Criminal Court in October 1910.
Prosecution
The advocates for the prosecution were formidable: Sir Richard Muir and Travers Humphreys. The case for the prosecution was seemingly formidable. The man with the mistress often wants to get rid of the wife. The problem was that there was no body, and in a murder case it is helpful, though not essential, to have a body. The death can be proved either by way of confession or by cogent and compelling circumstantial evidence supporting the inference from which there can be no reasonable doubt (R v Onufrejczyk (1955) 39 Cr App R 1, (1954) 2 QB 388, (1955) 1 All ER 247. R v Cam (1947), the porthole murder). The first time the police searched the house they found nothing. The second time they found under the cellar floor a piece of flesh caked in lime and soil, which was produced in evidence in court. This was the lower part of an abdomen, with part of the wife's underclothing adhering, and wrapped in bits of Crippen's pyjamas. There was a line across the abdomen, consistent so the prosecution said with a four inch scar the wife was known to carry following a hysterectomy or ovaries removal some 15 years earlier. Traces of hyoscine, a powerful poison, were found in the flesh. The principal expert witness for the prosecution was Bernard Spilsbury, the eminent Home Office pathologist, who was definite and impressive in his evidence. He was assisted by Dr William Willcox and Professor Pepper. The prosecution pointed out that by reason of his profession, Crippen knew about poisons and drugs and he knew about how to cut up bodies and dispose of them. Crippen denied ever having done surgery or postmortem. Lime destroys flesh, though clay can inhibit that process.
Defence
The defence was that no body, no bones and no limbs had been produced. The flesh was not proved to be that of the wife; it could have been anybody, a man even. The line was not a scar but the creasing or folding that commonly occurs in cadavers, and there was evidence of sebaceous glands and hair follicles, which would not have been present in a scar. Even if, which was not admitted, it was a scar, a scar was commonly found on a woman following a hysterectomy and a man following stones or bladder operations. Anyway, the alleged scar would have been different in such cases. Before they examined the flesh, both Dr Willcox and Dr Spilsbury knew that the wife did in fact have a scar.
Originally the defence experts, Dr Turnbull and Dr Wall, gave a written report to the effect that the flesh was thigh and not abdomen, and then subsequently changed their minds, which not surprisingly the judge referred to as reflecting upon competence and credibility.
Crippen himself, who was in a position both professionally and maritally to speak of these things, wrote after his conviction that the actual operation had been ‘a simple ovariotomy, the incision from a little above the pubis head to the navel performed for dysmenorrhoea and prolapsed uterus’, whereas Willcox and Spilsbury alleged a very different kind of scar.
The defence pointed to the fact that Crippen had purchased the hyoscine openly and signed the poisons book. Hyoscine can even appear naturally in putrefying flesh. Apparently also hyoscine was used at the time to ‘calm the patient's nerves’, a nerve tonic, a sedative, a muscle relaxant, to induce sleep, to induce memory loss, even to ease abortion – administered for an innocent purpose or at least not a murderous purpose.
The bit of flesh was not discovered in the first search, only on the second search.
Logically (although criminals do not always act logically) would a murderer poison his wife and then trouble to cut up the dead body? Would a murderer dispose of the body elsewhere but leave only the abdomen under the cellar floor? Would a murderer leave incriminating bits of his clothing with the body or bits of the body?
If the body or just the abdomen had in fact lain under the cellar floor from about the end of January to July when the abdomen (only) was found, one imagines that there might well have been a distinctive odour, which the now resident mistress may have noticed and not have enjoyed, and might have commented upon, and possibly even taken action. The police evidence did refer to a strong odour. The ‘cellar’ was more of a basement area, in which Crippen and the mistress ate their meals and spent a good deal of time.
As for the inconsistent and lying explanations concerning the departure of the wife, and alleged subsequent death in America, Crippen was socially embarrassed, the humiliation of his wife having left him, and separation was frowned upon and divorce extremely difficult in England in 1910 for the middle classes. Adultery may have taken place in England in 1910 but it was not admitted or socially acceptable to the middle classes.
There was apparently a witness statement taken by the police from a neighbour or passerby who said that several days before the disappearance she saw a woman departing supervising some trunks, but the statement was not disclosed nor the witness called. The prosecution evidence at the trial had been that the wife's things had not in fact been taken away.
The witnesses for the defence were not so impressive in the witness box as those for the prosecution; and Alfred Tobin QC for the defence was not of the quality of the advocates for the prosecution. The prosecution seemed somewhat dispirited.
Convicted
On the fifth day of the trial, Saturday 22 October 1910, after less than half an hour of deliberation by the jury, Crippen was convicted and sentenced to death.
Appeal
An appeal was heard a couple of weeks later on 5 November 1910. There were three legal grounds of appeal.
During the trial a juror fell ill in the courtroom and was taken out by the bailiff and attended to by the doctors; as it happened, the doctors in the case. The bailiff was unsworn for this purpose. It was held that although desirable it was not essential that the bailiff be sworn for this purpose. The juror quickly recovered and returned. In those days the jurors had to be kept together in the presence of a sworn bailiff; though they could spend the night in a hotel (in separate beds as counsel conceded), again this had to be in the presence of a sworn bailiff.
The second ground was that in examination in chief the prosecution did not prove the ownership of the pyjamas, having in cross-examination led Crippen to deny that they were his, or to say that he had thrown them away earlier, and subsequently gave evidence in rebuttal by proving that they did belong to Crippen. It was held that although normally the prosecution cannot subsequently mend deficiencies in their evidence by calling further evidence to repair the deficiencies, it is a matter for the discretion of the judge, properly exercised in this case.
The third ground was errors or inadequacies in the summing up to the jury. The judge had said that it was not seriously disputed that the flesh came from a woman, whereas it had been seriously disputed; the prosecution had said that the navel had been removed, which had been challenged by the defence. The Court of Appeal held that although in parts the summing up was ambiguous, not expressed so exactly and clearly and fully as might have been desirable, nonetheless taken as a whole the summing up spoke of the burden of proof, that the jury must be satisfied of guilt, and the summing up was adequate, full and fair and there was no injustice.
Subsequently
In 1949 Professor Newcomb, an eminent and respected pathologist, produced the flesh in question from a pot and told the medical students at St Mary's that the line in the flesh was in his opinion not a scar but folded skin, because he detected hair follicles which would not have been present in a scar. In 2002 Professor Bernard Knight looked at some microscope slides taken from the autopsy on the parts of the body found in the cellar which were discovered in the London Hospital. They were the slides from the abdominal skin. He examined them and could see no sign of a scar. Working on samples preserved from the 1910 trial, Dr David Foran of the State University of Michigan has established by DNA that the flesh did not come from Cora Crippen, comparing DNA from her descendants. He has also established that the flesh was male, not female.
Crippen knew that the abdomen was not that of his wife, and was a plant.
The mistress
The mistress, Ethel Le Neve, was tried separately, defended by F E Smith, and acquitted.
Anxious for mistress
Crippen was anxious lest the mistress would be implicated and would be at the risk of going down with him, hanged or imprisoned, and therefore psychologically be sought to draw the fire to himself so as to exonerate her. Throughout he always sought to exonerate her and to protect her.
Conclusion
Over the years a number of theories have been discussed. One is that Crippen simply wanted to be rid of the marriage and to live with and marry the mistress. His affair had been going on for three years and maybe it was unsatisfactory, and the mistress wanted marriage. However, the three parties had endured the situation for some years and it seemed to have become routine and accepted. Anyway, even in Edwardian times he need not have murdered the wife, he could have simply left the wife and set up home with the mistress.
Another theory is that the wife ‘let him hang’. The Crippen case was a celebrated case at the time and had she been alive the wife would surely have heard about it, even in America if that is where she was, and would have come forward. Though perhaps she did not hear. The United States is a very big country, communications were not particularly good, and in isolationist America the residents in a particular state were often indifferent and ignorant of what was going on in the next federal state, let alone in Europe. Or perhaps she did hear but did nothing, so as to punish him because of his adultery and unfaithfulness. There has been some suggestion that she lived for years in New York with her sister and called herself Belle Rose, but this has not been established.
Another theory, the Marshall Hall theory, is that the wife was a demanding nymphomaniac and he was finding it too exhausting to service the two women, so he administered the hyoscine to the wife as a sexual depressant. Unfortunately he mistakenly gave her an overdose which proved fatal. Had he not concealed what had happened but called the police he could have got away with manslaughter, criminal negligence. However, the evidence was that husband and wife had occupied separate rooms for some four years, and no longer felt for each other, and therefore this theory is very implausible.
Another theory, the Filson Young theory, is that the wife had threatened to leave him and take her jewellery and furs with her, and had actually attempted to withdraw their joint savings from the bank, leaving him with only his own very modest and somewhat precarious income. Knowing her determination when her mind was made up, he administered a huge dose of hyoscine, killed her and then skilfully cut up the body and either burnt it or disposed of it or, very unlikely, buried it in lime under the cellar floor. If he had kept his cool after the police first interviewed him, and they were in fact satisfied with his explanation for the disappearance, and not fled, almost certainly the police would have closed the case, simply recording the wife as a missing person. This theory is plausible, but the police suspicions were aroused: they felt he was guilty, they could not find the body, so they planted the abdomen. Apparently the police did have a statement that the wife was seen leaving the house with some trunks a little while before she disappeared, a statement that was not disclosed. Also there was evidence, again not disclosed, that at that time she withdrew or attempted to withdraw substantial sums from their joint account. In very high-profile criminal cases the police often come under intense pressure to find the criminal, or at any rate to find someone.
Another theory is that the wife died, perhaps from an overdose of hyoscine. Crippen was anxious that he might be suspected of murder. It was said that he consulted a lawyer, was advised that he could plead guilty, or might well be found guilty, and receive a sentence of perhaps five years. Ethel Le Neve would be at risk of being charged and convicted of being an accessory before the fact and at risk of a prison sentence. Crippen could not face this consequence for his mistress, so accordingly simply pleaded not guilty to murder, with unfortunate consequences as it turned out.
Was Crippen then guilty or innocent? Was it that the police felt sure that he was their man, but could not find the body, so planted the abdomen and thereby secured his conviction, so despite the improper plant ‘justice was done’? Curiously, Superintendent Dew retired from the police immediately after the case. Or was Crippen guilty of only manslaughter and could have received a prison sentence, but could not face the risk of the mistress being sent to prison? Or was it that the police belief was wrong and the improper plant led to the death of an innocent man? Even if he was guilty, it may be argued that the end does not justify the means. A hundred years and on we shall never know the truth. Maybe it now does not matter. Though the Crippen family in Coldwater, Michigan, America want the remains of Crippen to be returned to America and buried in a Crippen family grave.
If it had been revealed at the trial that the abdomen was male the prosecution would have discontinued or the judge would have stopped the case or the jury would have acquitted. Prophetically, in summing up the judge said that if the abdomen had been male that would have been the end of it!
Crippen never admitted guilt. When called upon before sentence, ‘Do you wish to say anything?’ he said ‘I am innocent’ and ‘I shall protest my innocence’. From prison in the days before the execution he wrote to the mistress protesting his innocence.